All-New Ghost Rider #5

Running behind schedule this morning, which is a common problem for a comic-book reader. Issues stack up and go unread and misplaced. Organization is a constant struggle. My usual pattern is to go to the neighborhood comic shop every Wednesday evening after work. I come home and lay the stack of comic books I've purchased, still bagged in brown paper, on the dinner table.

And there they stay, along with issues that arrive in the mail from Midtown Comics in Manhattan, the company which now handles Marvel subscription service, for weeks on end sometimes. I add to the stack each Wednesday night.

Then, depending upon my Saturday post-run whim, I'll rummage through the pile and pull out the issues that I want to dine on with my endorphin high. Problem is by doing this I scatter any kind of natural chronological order which can be tracked by scanning the receipts from the comic shop.

I am then confronted with a puzzle when I want to try to find a particular issue, like this morning when I attempted to locate Bucky Barnes: The Winter Soldier #1. Mild anxiety ensues and I decide to pitch in and sort the issues by title. I'd say this happens every month. And this morning was that time of the month.

In many ways it is a boy's life I lead. I am still enthralled with the National Football League as I was in grade school, and, now, after many years away, I read comic books.

Anyway, the current predicament, a tendency towards disorganization, I remember from my grade-school youth. A recurring dream I have dreamed all throughout my adult life, even after I had left comic books many years behind me, was this feeling of anxiety of having all these unread issues stacked up and waiting to read.

Now at age 50, feeling this way not only about comic books, but book books, and newspapers and magazines, I'm beginning to think this is the prime engine for a certain category of the Chinese Buddhist "hungry ghost." Spirits such as my own, addicted, greedy for textual encounters that have gone unrequited, will be reborn as hungry ghosts. No Nirvana for me. I'll hover over the wall-mounted new-release display at the neighborhood comic shop and the remainder table at the few, if any, brick-&-mortar bookstores still standing.

Last Saturday and the afternoon of Veterans Day holiday on Tuesday I read all the issues of All-New Ghost Rider. Each number was tantalizing, even when the superb artist Tradd Moore handed off to Damion Scott (pencils) and Robert Campanella (inks) after the fifth issue.

Val Staples provides the colors -- which are incredible! -- for both. You can see a lot of cholita-lipstick red in the seven scans below from All-New Ghost Rider #5, as a new Ghost Rider -- this one inhabits the body of a LA high-school student named Robbie Reyes, who drives a ghost hot rod instead of a chopped Harley like the original Marvel Ghost Rider, stunt rider Johnny Blaze -- does battle with a pill-popping, overdosing Mister Hyde. Writer Felipe Smith crafts a brisk narrative.

If you ever want to know what growing up on the West Coast in the early 1970s was like, listen to "Come and Go Blues" by The Allman Brothers Band and read Ghost Rider written by Gary Friedrich with art by the great Mike Ploog.